Stretchable Conductor for Elastic Electronics and Gentler Medical Devices

Flexible electronics have a wide variety of possibilities, from bendable displays and batteries to medical implants that move with the body. Finding good conductors that work when pulled to twice their length is a challenge, and researchers have tried wires in assorted patterns, liquid metals, nanowire networks, and more. Now, University of Michigan engineers have found that polyurethane studded with spherical, gold nanoparticles may make the best stretchy conductor yet. "As we stretch, they rearrange themselves to maintain the conductivity, and this is the reason why we got the amazing combination of stretchability and electrical conductivity," said chemical engineering professor Nicholas Kotov. The researchers chiefly see their stretchable conductors as electrodes, and improving medical implants is of particular interest to Kotov.

Transcript

00:00:00 greater and greater proliferation of new type of consumer electronics which is flexible causes stretching and maintaining a high conductivity combined with the ability to stretch is of great importance for such devices we develop a new stretchable conductor which is utilizing small uh nanometer scale part I Les which are

00:00:31 very easy to incorporate we found that uh stretch of conductor from nanop particles can be um can show excellent properties in terms of conductivity and stretchability and that way we we could have high conductivity up to five times of stretching of the original composite the majority of other materials which have this capabilities come at a price they have a limit of

00:00:58 stretchability due to reorganization of this long pieces of conductors inside the material when we stretch the material instead of expanding the gaps between them they actually self organizing the chains and that's the trick of having high stretchability and high conductivity the particles are not behaving in a random way and that results in high mobility of the charges

00:01:29 and high conductivity there will be a lot of application for This research they can be used electrodic for flexible and stretchable electronics like flexible display flexible like cell phone it's indicative of just a start of new family of the materials which can be made from a large variety of very different nanop particles for large variety of

00:01:53 applications